The Bete Noire of Feminism

By MARTHA DUFFY PHILADELPHIA

"There is something in my book to offend absolutely everybody. I am proabortion, pro the legal use of drugs, propornography, child pornography, snuff films. And I am going after these things until Gloria Steinem screams."

The speaker -- at nonstop, sewing-machine speed -- is Camille Paglia, contrarian academic and feminist bete noire, and her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale University Press), is the most explosive tome to emerge from academe in quite some time. The book is about many things -- paganism, pop culture, androgyny, sexual conflicts -- but what has drawn the media with magnetic force is the author's contempt for modern feminists. Paglia writes with freshness and blithe arrogance, and she does not hesitate to hurl brazen insults. She accuses author Germaine Greer, for example, of becoming "a drone in three years," sated with early success. Susan Sontag is another victim of celebrity. Princeton feminist Diana Fuss's output is "just junk -- appalling!"

Along with the zingers, Paglia articulates positions that many people of both genders seem to want to hear these days. To them feminism has gone quite far enough, and they like Personae's neoconservative cultural message: Men have done the work of civilization and can take credit for most of its glories. Women are powerful too, but as the inchoate forces of nature are powerful. Religion and marriage are historically the best defenses against chaos.

Such theories have aroused profound displeasure among feminist authors. For one thing, as Teresa L. Ebert at the State University of New York, Albany, points out, they were caught napping by Paglia. "She wasn't taken seriously, but her attacks are part of Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's conservatism," says Ebert. "They mean a backlash against women. Paglia is reviving old stereotypes with new energy." Harvard's Helen Vendler says Paglia "lives in hyperbole. It is a level of discourse appropriate to politics, sermons, headlines. She should be on talk shows, talking to Geraldo." She probably will be.

In fairness it should be said that nothing about Personae was calculated to bring its author notoriety. The book was rejected by an honor roll of prestigious publishers. But when success finally came, nine years after the manuscript was completed, the star was ready and waiting to be born. Personae climbed to seventh place on the paperback best-seller list, a true rarity for a scholarly book.

Paglia is the new media princess, and acts the part. When she accepts a speaking engagement now, she generally shows up with two massive bodyguards togged out in black leather jackets. She has been featured in the New Republic, Playboy, New York, NYQ (for New York Queer), Russian, Japanese and French publications.

One reason for her high profile is that Paglia has bristling opinions on subjects other than feminism -- particularly education. She advocates a core curriculum based mostly on the classics and rails against what she considers politicized frills, such as most African-American studies and the currently chic French theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Never one to let consistency get in her way, Paglia has a strong libertarian streak -- on subjects like pornography -- that go straight to her '60s coming-of-age.

Loquacious is too impoverished a word to describe Paglia's speaking style. She talks at triple speed, rarely even using contractions, hurtling along in a grating pitch that comes perilously close to a cackle. Her aural punctuation is hilarious. A recent SRO lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was typical. Yuh? Yuh? O.K.? O.K.? peppered her speech, and the audience answered right back.

Someone recently compared Paglia with Phyllis Schlafly, and she was appalled. Despite all the brickbats, Paglia considers herself a lifelong feminist; Personae took shape when she read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and resolved "to do something massive for women." But Paglia believes the current movement has declined into smug formulas and codes of political correctness. "What began as a movement of eccentric individualists has turned into an ideology that attracts weak personalities who are looking for something to believe in." Or, she adds, someone to blame: to her, rape is a dreadful crime, but women who make their accusations years later -- not to mention those who complain of date rape and sexual harassment -- are deluded. Anita Hill should have stepped forward at once when Clarence Thomas was offensive to her, she argues. "My feminism is, like, deal with it!" says Paglia. "Not ten years later."

Paglia's ideal women are independent, like Amelia Earhart or Katharine Hepburn. She became obsessed with Earhart as a teenager and even wrote a book- length manuscript about her. Little Camille's enthusiasms were something her Italian immigrant parents fostered. Her father, a French professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, taught her to pursue goals aggressively. Today the daughter says ruefully, "He created a monster he couldn't control."

She can't remember a time when she was not scuffling with boys to be first in line. When she devoured books on ancient Egypt, her father was gratified. But movies also held her in thrall. Paglia's love affair with popular culture, which forms the forthcoming second volume of Personae, was already blossoming when she was a child. "Egypt and Hollywood were equivalent phenomena to me, equally rich and fabulous," she says. Her father demurred. "He lectured me on Voltaire's disapproval of actors," Camille recalls, "and this was the time when I was making my collection of 599 Elizabeth Taylor pictures."

In 10th grade Paglia got her first taste of social ostracism and its consequences. Some of the pretty blonds in her class suddenly turned into bland, cliquish sorority queens. She was left behind as a tomboy with a serious case of ambition. The lesson was not lost on her; to this day she sides fiercely with the outsider.

She was class valedictorian at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in 1968, "when it was full of radicals." The students were throwing off '50s shackles and looking to other cultures for solutions. The Doors' battle cry, "We want the world, We want it now," exhilarated Paglia. After four restless years at Yale getting her Ph.D. in English, she found herself teaching at Bennington.

Her seven-year stint there was a series of explosions. For one thing, she is, as she says in a rare understatement, "physical." Paglia throws punches. She kicks people twice her size. Once she even called the president of the college to inform her that she was about to kick an obnoxious male student. Fine, said the president, who was new on the job and probably thinking in metaphors. Paglia landed one that sent the fellow sprawling in the cafeteria. Says the woman warrior: "Committees were always convening over me." After leaving Bennington in 1979 -- one tiff too many -- she struggled for a decade to support herself.

Paglia usually refers to her private life as a disaster. Through the years she has had relationships with both women and men and for a while considered herself a lesbian. "But lesbians don't like me," she notes, in part because she insists that most women are bisexual, that the role of hormones accounts for an inevitable attraction between the sexes. Lately Paglia has been going out with men. But, she asks, "what man is going to take me seriously? I'm not a nurturer. Men have flashes of ego and confidence followed by relapses. They have to be stroked, and I don't have that patience." There is also the age problem. Recently she dated men around her age, 44, but found them over the hill sexually. She would prefer younger men, but her pride restrains her. "Like there's something faintly ridiculous about Cher with that young guy: she looks like a dowager with a gigolo." Some dowager.

Paglia will take next fall off from her academic and speechifying schedule to get the second volume of Personae into shape. The book promises to be a whopper, the author's thoughts on a lifetime of blustery enthusiasm for popular culture. The sport section, for instance, will deal with baseball vs. football: Paglia is passionately in favor of the latter. Baseball she considers an academic pastime: "Wasp, cerebral, Protestant." Football, on the other hand, she wishes she could have played: "The rhythms of my writing are high impact. Colleagues have seen my ability to look downfield and see pockets of trouble. And I hit them."

What she will say about her beloved rock idols is less clear. Megasuccess may be poisoning them. She finds Michael Jackson's current album "appalling," Prince a letdown, Madonna drifting. "She wants to cover all frontiers, but she has very little talent for acting," says one of the Material Girl's most vocal fans. "O.K.?"

O.K. But Paglia is determined to hit a few frontiers too. Kafka once said "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us." Paglia wants to write that book -- "not the Band-Aid, not the comforter, not the down quilt." The ax.